Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Luca
The playroom door stands half open, and a child is laughing behind it.
Not Nina. The other girl, Kristen's. Then Nina's voice underneath, quieter, careful even here. I stop in the corridor with my hand on the frame and give myself three seconds. A girl her age in a room built for children, dolls on the rug, a fridge painted with ladybugs.
I count the three seconds and go in.
Kristen sits cross-legged on the floor between the girls. Gemma is on the low couch holding a juice box.
Nina sees me first. She doesn't hide behind her mother's leg this time. She lifts the bear so I can see it made it out of the apartment.
"Good," I tell her.
She nods like we've closed a deal and goes back to the dolls. My throat is tight.
"Gemma. A word. Outside."
She's already standing. She passes the juice to Nina, murmurs a promise about coming right back, and follows me into the corridor.
The hallway is quiet and I stop where I can see both ends of the corridor, and I turn around.
She waits. Her hands are folded in front of her. Bruno's office swallowed me, and I haven't seen her since the car.
"Are you okay?" I ask.
"I am now."
That's all she gives me. She doesn't explain the now because she doesn't have to. I know that back in that room this morning, she was thinking that something terrible would happen to them. I understand what it costs her to say even that much to a man like me.
I nod.
"Are you okay?" she says.
I search for the last time someone asked me that and waited for an answer. Nobody has asked the question the way she just did, with her eyes on my face, holding still for whatever comes back.
I step closer. My feet decide it before I do, and my mouth follows them.
"What if I’m fucking not?"
There's no reason to say it. But being around her makes me saying whatever pops up in my head.
Her breath catches. From this close she has to tilt her head back to hold my eyes, and I like the angle of it.
I like that she looks at my face instead of my hands.
Everyone watches my hands. Her eyes move across my face like there's information in it worth having. I stand there and let her take it.
The radiator ticks down the hall. My shoulder aches where the scar pulls. I could count the distance between us in centimeters and I'm aware of every one of them.
Gemma
"I wouldn't like that," I say. It comes out low. "You not being okay. I wouldn't like it."
His head tilts a little. "Why the fuck not?"
I keep my eyes on his, even as my breath turns shallow and quick.
"Because you have to be okay. I owe you my life, and Nina's, and probably a car, technically, and shoes, and there's a system to owing people.
Τhe system doesn't work if the person you owe isn't okay.
So you have to be okay. And if you're not, I'll make you be okay.
I don't know how yet, but I'll figure it out.
I could sing to you. I have a genuinely ugly voice, my brother used to leave the room, so if you hear it you'll realize things could be a lot worse than whatever they are now, and that's basically therapy. "
Somewhere in the middle of that I heard myself offer to sing to a mafia man as a medical treatment.
My face goes hot from the neck up. This is what I do. Dominik used to grab my wrist to make me quit talking, and I flex my fingers at the memory before I can stop them.
But Luca isn't grabbing anything. He's looking at me, and one corner of his mouth moves.
"Bet I'd like it either way," he says.
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out of it.
Same flat voice as always. Except this time it lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there, warm.
I close my mouth. My pulse is doing more than the moment calls for, and I take a step back because the space between us has stopped being neutral space.
"I'm going to—" I point a thumb at the playroom door. "Nina. I should get back to Nina now."
"Okay." He nods once. The crack in his mouth is gone, sealed back over. "We'll talk later. About what happens next."
"Okay."
He turns and walks down the hallway toward the big staircase.
I stand there and watch him go.
And then my eyes drop, and I'm looking at his ass.
Which is inappropriate. But the facts are the facts, and the fact is he has a really nice ass. Dark jeans, and he's lean everywhere, and it's just—it's a good one. Objectively.
He turns at the end of the hall and disappears down the stairs. I keep standing there like a lamp.
Okay. Concentrate. There is a four-year-old on the other side of this door who watched her mother hide her behind a bed this morning.
Luca
The gravel path runs the length of the compound's back garden, and Valentino sets a pace slow enough that my leg keeps up without me asking him to.
He walks with his hands behind his back like a man inspecting a property he might buy.
He flew in this morning. Nobody told me until he was already in Bruno's office. That's how they do it here. You find out about things when the things are already done.
"Amanda," I say. "How is she?"
"Good." He glances at the greenhouse, not at me. "Better than she was a few months ago. She works. She sleeps. She laughs at me when I deserve it, which is often, according to her."
"That's good to hear."
"It is."
We walk in silence for a few moments. We do that back in Sicily every now and then. Walk around when things are going to get bad.
"You asked about her," Valentino says, "so I'll say the rest. You don't have to carry Rome. It's finished. She doesn't blame you. I don't blame you. Nobody's carrying it but you."
I take a drag and let the smoke out slow.
"You heard about Bruno's plan," I say.
"I heard."
"Then you know why this can't happen. I shouldn't be the one standing next to anybody. You want to know what I'm good for? Ask Rome. They took her out of the goddamn car, Valentino. I was right there, and they pulled her out of the car while I bled on the seat like a stuck pig."
He stops walking and I stop too, because keeping going would make a point I don't want to make.
"You were shot nearly to death, for God's sake.
" His voice stays level, but it drops, and the Italian comes up under his English.
"Two rounds. One of them missed the artery in your leg by a centimeter.
The doctor in Rome told me a person with those wounds should not have been conscious.
She's alive. She's whole. She's in Chicago right now building a foundation and correcting my grammar. "
He turns to face me full on. "We're okay now, Luca. All of us. There's no need for you to keep walking around with that day in your pocket. You have enough ghosts. Don't invent new ones."
He knows about Elena. He's one of maybe four people alive who does. He's the only one who's ever said it to my face and lived through the silence after.
I don't answer him. There's nothing in me that answers that.
"So," he says. "The marriage."
"Bruno's already decided."
"Bruno decided the family needs leverage on Cesare Orsini.
He didn't decide it has to be you standing at the altar.
" He starts walking again. "You don't have to be the one to marry her, Luca.
It's paper. It's for the business to happen, and you know it.
Liam can sign a paper. Any soldier with a clean record can sign a paper. Nobody would think less of you."
"Fuck Liam," I say.
Valentino's eyebrow moves.
"It's not — " I stop. Start again, because half sentences are for men who don't know their own position.
"She trusts me. Nina trusts me. You put a stranger in that apartment with a ring and a story, Gemma runs, then Orsini takes her off the street and we've got nothing.
I'm the option that works. That's the whole of it. "
"Of course," Valentino says. "Purely operational."
"Don't do that."
"I'm not doing anything." He looks up at the gray sky, and for a moment he almost smiles, which on his face is a small earthquake.
"I'm walking in a garden with an old friend who told me, ninety seconds ago, that he shouldn't be trusted to stand next to anybody.
And who is now explaining to me, in detail, why he's the only man in Chicago who can stand next to this particular woman. "
The cigarette's burned down to my fingers. I drop it on the gravel and grind it out with the heel of my good leg.
"It's the job," I say.
"Va bene." He starts back toward the house. "Then do the job."
"How long," I say.
Valentino looks at me sideways.
"Chicago," I say. "How long do I stay?"
He sighs.
"A year. Minimum." He watches a gull fight the wind over the wall and lose ground.
"Orsini's people will look at this marriage from every angle.
They'll watch the two of you at dinners, at church, at the market if they can manage it.
A husband who signs a certificate and flies home in a month tells them the entire thing is paper.
A year of you two looking happily married, and it holds. "
A year. I turn the word over and it doesn't fit anywhere. A job takes three days, a week, a month if it's complicated.
"A year," I say.
"At least."
"And Sicily runs itself."
"Sicily runs on Fabio." Valentino's mouth pulls down at one corner. "Which means Sicily runs fine and I age ten years. Until you come back, that man is going to drive me out of my goddamn mind."
That gets a smile out of me before I know it's coming. My face isn't used to it. The muscles pull wrong, like a door on hinges nobody's oiled.
"Fabio's one of the best men we've got," I say. "You know that. You wouldn't hand him the coast if you didn't."
"He's a pain in the ass." Valentino turns his back to the wind and faces me. "Last week. The Messina crews, the ones causing problems at the port. I told him, take three men, sit across the table, let them talk themselves tired. Simple. I said it in plain Italian. Do not go alone."
"He went alone."
"He went alone." Valentino holds up four fingers. "And he killed four of them. Four, Luca. Because one of them made a joke about him and the other three laughed."
The laugh comes up out of me rough, scraping on the way. It's been a while since anything used that road.
"Bullshit," I say. "That's not why he shot them.
Fabio doesn't kill a man over a fucking joke.
I'd bet the house outside Palermo there were four other reasons sitting at that table, and he'd already counted every one of them before he walked in.
The joke just handed him the right moment. He took it."
Valentino nods slow, and there's respect in it even through the irritation.
"You're probably right. Knowing him, he had it decided in the car.
" He rubs the bridge of his nose. "It doesn't change the phone call.
Two in the morning. His voice, flat as bread.
'I need a cleanup at the port.' Not an explanation.
A cleanup. Four bodies, and he says it the way another man asks you to move your car. "
"That's why he's good," I say. "You want a man who apologizes, hire a fucking waiter."
"I want a man who takes the three men I tell him to take." But he's not angry when he says it. There's a warmth under it that he'd deny if I named it. Twenty years those two, and me, have been walking next to each other. You don't get to complain about a man like that without caring for him first.